"Mine? Oh, mine's Henrietta Manners; only," she added hastily—"only that's my real name. I was born with it. Now most of the girls got theirs out of story-books. Georgiana Trevelyan and Goldy Courtleigh and Gladys Carringford and Angelina Lancaster and Phœbe Arlington—them girls all got theirs out of stories. But mine's my own. You see," and she drew near that no other ear might hear the secret of her proud birth—"you see, Manners was my mother's name, and she ran away and married my papa against her rich father's wishes. He was a banker. I mean mama's papa was a banker, but my papa was only a poor young gentleman. So grandfather cut her off without a cent in his will, but left everything to me if I would take the name of Manners."
The heroine of this strange romance stopped for breath, and if I had cherished any doubts of the truth of her story in the beginning, at least I was sure now that she believed it all herself; one glance into her steady blue eyes, in which a telltale moisture was already gathering, was proof of that.
"No, indeed," continued Miss Manners: "I haven't always been a working-girl. I used to go to boarding-school. I thought I'd be a governess or something, and once I tried to learn bookkeeping, but my eyes give out, and the figures mixed up my brain so, and then I got sick and had to come to this box-factory. But I'm the first Manners that ever worked."
I was now thoroughly ashamed of my first unjust suspicions that Henrietta might not be strictly truthful, and I inquired with sincere interest as to the fate of her ill-starred family.
"All dead and sleeping in our family vault," she replied wistfully. "But don't let us talk anything more about it. I get so worked up and mad when I talk about the Mannerses and the way they treated me and my poor parents!"
The threatened spell with Henrietta's nerves was averted by a sudden turning on of the power, and the day's work began. Phœbe did not appear to claim me, and I worked away as fast as I could to help swell Henrietta's dividends.
"I guess you can stay with her the rest of the day," Annie Kinzer said, stopping at the table. "The 'Moonlight Maids' must have been too much for Phœbe. Guess she won't show up to-day."
Henrietta was naturally delighted with the arrangement, which would add a few pennies to her earnings. "I only made sixty cents yesterday, and I worked like a dog," she remarked. "It was a bad day for everybody. We ought to make more than a dollar to-day. Phœbe says you're a hustler."